3D modeling and location

The starting point is our long-standing experience in the field of 3D computer vision including motion analysis, 3D reconstruction, and object recognition.

We are now exploring the use of prior information on the geometry of the viewed scene to the purpose of detecting accurately location and pose of objects of interest. A main application setting we are considering is planetary Entry Descent and Landing (EDL). Within this challenging research activity we focus in particular on:

relative pose estimation, where we deal with the problem of estimating the relative pose of a spacecraft from image points often in quasi-degenerate configurations (in particular lying on planar surfaces)

absolute pose estimation, in this case the final goal is to precisely locate the spacecraft with respect to the planet geography. Here we address in particular the problem of detecting landmarks on the surface.

computer vision methods for safe landing, here in particular we address the problem of surface slope estimation and rock detection.

We are also looking at the use of computational algebraic techniques for studying the geometric structure of the viewed scene.